Sometimes the most interesting part of going to a movie isn't the movie.

After many years reviewing many movies, gay, straight, undeclared, foreign and domestic, for the Bay Area Reporter, I'm rarely in a hurry to see a film that isn't starring Eva Green, Isabelle Huppert, possibly Catherine Deneuve and of course Meryl Streep's reliable, or a classic I have or haven't seen. And by classic I mean masterpieces like the romantic comedy The Awful Truth (1937) or the documentary Battle of Algiers(1966).

The Awful Truth stars the sublime Irene Dunne and Cary Grant.

Sitting at the bar in the Kabuki cineplex in San Francisco's Japantown during the Asian-American Film Festival, a Japanese-American film-lover asked me to name my favorite film and we both knew that was impossible but The Battle of Algiers came to mind since I didn't think she'd be familiar with The Awful Truth. Turned out she hadn't heard of the anti-colonialist, filmed-on-a-dime, tense, taut, fictionalized reenactment of the French attempt to tame Arab terrorism via torture in the last outpost of their empire, which the Pentagon screened during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. (Read two short New Yorker pieces about it here and here.) She said she'd try to remember to watch the dvd.

You can watch the whole Battle of Algiers on YouTube.

She'd just seen a fascinating documentary about Patsy Mink, prime mover behind Title IX, federal legislation that gave women equal access to collegiate sports and academic activities in 1972. My interlocutrix, from Patsy's own state, Hawaii, had taken the first Asian-American woman elected to the U.S. Congress for granted, unaware of all the obstacles she'd pioneered her way past.

Gliding conversationally from Mink to Milk, she asked what I'd thought of Sean Penn's performance. I said I'd like to see the tragic version of Dan White's inability to stomach his gay rival's political triumph. I'd like a filmmaker to focus in tight and hold on the irrational aggressions we as queers suffer from personally and politically every day of our lives. Maybe director Kimberly Peirce already sort of did that with Boys Don't Cry.

This was a fun conversation.

Which I wouldn't have had, had Iyemon Cha bottled Japanese green tea not launched their U.S. campaign in San Francisco, causing their New York representative to invite me to a reception for the director and actors of White on Rice, a Japanese-American comedy directed by a young white guy. I like events. I like looking at and talking to people at events. And sometimes the food's good, too.

Corporate support for the arts is a good thing.

I lucked out. There was a steaming tray full of brownie-sized chunks of meat I was told were short ribs, which I cut with a fork. Apologies to vegetarians and cows. I missed out on the crab cakes but exploited the bruschetta, which was addictive.

And the tea? Served in wine glasses as befits a luxury item, both the sencha and hojicha were full-bodied and smooth. I could drink it all day, only not at $2.75 per 12.2-ounce bottle.

The movie? Sold-out. A funny but sloppily plotted character sketch written and directed by Dave Boyle, starring a charismatic deadpan goof, Hiroshi Watanabe. The topic? A guy who's divorced, a dreamer, looking for a girlfriend, chasing an unresponsive love object: an existential situation I have too much insight into, filmed from the heterosexist point of view. I was surrounded by straight people, it felt like. A strange sensation in San Francisco.

After the movie and another fab chat with another Japanese-American dish who sat beside me clutching a gold Coach bag, I made my way to the ladies' room. Approaching the door marked "Women" I suddenly regretted my buzz-cut-plus-tie-plus-man's-jacket. I steeled myself to argue my right to piss green tea in a stall but none of the Japanese-American dolls half my height said a word.

ineffable : especially literary or formal 1 unable to be described or expressed in words, especially because of size, magnificence, etc • the ineffable love of God. 2 not supposed or not allowed to be said, especially because of being perceived as too sacred. ineffability or ineffableness noun. ineffably adverb.
ETYMOLOGY: 15c: French, from Latin ineffabilis.

"communities" or "demographics" of minorities (or in the case of women, majorities treated as minorities) be they ethnic, race, religion-based, constitute lobbies in the usa. france doesn't work this way: people are simply french. us populace is fragmented into "interest groups". until harvey milk, queers hadn't mobilized as a political force. he was a pioneer who hasn't spawned a successor. but we do have a gay movement, however ineffective & disorganized it is.

I'm wondering if it is peculiar to you because you are not familiar with the Castro neighborhood. Compared to life as we knew it in the rest of the country, life in the Castro was upside down. In the rest of America, heterosexuals dominated every community, and their representatives furthered their agendas: making things nice for churches and schools, closing down drug paraphanelia shops, preventing porno-flick business and sex-toy businesses from opening, keeping bars in out-of-the way locations, harassing "queers" and feminists so that they would leave town.

In the Castro, it was 180 degrees different. The bars were where the churches might have been. Sex toys and films were available everywhere. Men could spend their Saturdays at the Baths, located on the main street, having countless sexual partners instead of spending Saturday at Lowe's buying tomato plants to grow. (Actually, there was no Lowe's then.) People could walk in the middle of the street instead of being relegated to an orderly sidewalk. Instead of the street being quiet at 8 pm, it was just getting going then. And partying would continue until dawn. Gays were in the majority. If Milk had not furthered gay issues, he would not have represented his community.

i'm not American and it's very difficult for me to understand this *community* way of being a political activist. I don't only speak about Milk and gays. Each city counsellor appears only as the representant of a particular lobby and the town as the sad sum of separate communities. But i may be wrong, just a feeling.
i think GVS was interested in this confrontation between Harvey Milk's single life and history of the US in the seventies. Anyway, things were changing .. even R. Reagan disapproved Prop 6.
i love the movie and i felt so sad : what a curse being a queer.

you're right. he's not a flamer... funny, i think GVS is totally interested in gay rights & gave over huge chunk of his biopic to Anita Bryant footage to prove these rightwing zealots are the *same* rightwing zealots we dealt with 30 years ago. that was the documentary part i found interesting but out-of-place.

i don't agree whit you. Penn doesn't portray Milk as a "grande folle". He doesn't talk as a woman, walk as a woman, act as a woman. He is a man. But it's true the movie is not a documentary. I think Van Sant is not really interested in Milk's fight for gay rights. I saw the movie as the portrait of a not ordinary man who was gay in SF in the seventies. A man with a past and very deep wounds.

read that first new yorker article i cite. very interesting. the pentagon as you might know was *not* gungho on invading iraq. i think this film, a testament to french (colonial) failure, from a very persuasive, matter-of-fact standpoint, is the best argument for *not* invading, occupying, or trying to "tame" an arab country. not only does it demonstrate *intelligence* at the pentagon but i'd say the kind of realism utterly lacking from everything else neocon.

my assumption was that they were using it for tips because you said that they viewed it before the invasion. Those guys don't sit around viewing stuff for the purpose of world peace and understanding...

yeah, wtf were those pursed lips of Penn's? that's why i say in my review, maybe Robert Downey: he woulda played it *straight*. but then i started looking at Sean's lips and *they are* pursed... hmmm... but yeah, he made him a swisher. i think that reassures "straight" people. and his wife, too, maybe.

yeah, B&W rocks! i agree, wtf went into making that film! as for the pentagon, i'm sure some army types were persuaded of the impossibility of the task from watching it. but i hadn't really imagined its being used as "instrucitonal" -- color me naïve -- i started rewatching it on youtube & it's just the saddest movie ever made. that lead actor is phenomenal.

if you can get "awful truth" on dvd, obviously, picture quality will be better. *that* photography ain't bad, either!

I have only seen clips of Milk. I was troubled by Penn's exageration of Milk's femininity. Harvey Milk was not as feminine as Penn portrays him. Was Penn racheting up the ick factor so as to keep the audience staring?

Many of the gay men of the 80's reigned-in their femininity and applied it to their art and maybe to hidden love-fests. And at the risk of inciting a riot here, as is my calling in life, I really think it was a better way to go. By reigning in their femininity, they also reigned in their bitchiness and masogyny. Gender expression can go too far. We are not our gender. I loved guys like Milk in the 80s.

Erin, the clip from Battle of Algiers is stunning. As a destitute black and white photographer, I really appreciate the work that went into creating that film. Deep black shadow surrounding victims of "irrational aggression." Their desperate eyes caught by shocks of light with painfully delicate highlights. It is hard to watch. As a lesbian, I have felt hunted down by others, sometimes even by other lesbians and gay men, sadly.

On another note, I lived in the DC area for years and cringe at the idea of a bunch of ball-scratchin' Pentagoners attempting to gain instruction from this film so that they can fulfill their own goals of irrational aggression.

Thanks so much for the clips; I'm having trouble downloading the other because of my wireless connection but will eventually see it.

Forgive the jump in here, my lovely Steph, but those asterisks keep me hopping when it comes to Erin.....cause I tend to be a literal thinker I question the meanings of her asterisks - you know, when she uses them around a word is she meaning an omission, a reference, unattested, repetition, emphasis......the only thing I haven't found is them meaning multiply. But hey, I could be wrong.....

omg what an idiot! yes, as i state in the next paragraph. actually, it shows what a non-doc yet "factual" account can do with a real event. what "milk" refused to do: suck you into the action by being realer than real.

i can't go in and fix it cuz all the fffing videos will fall out. and mooooooon will never forgive me. cuz i didn't learn how to stick 'em back in.

I was, i guess, in grade school in honolulu when Patsy Mink was my congress woman -- too young to realize that she crafted title IX, and too young to realize what a feminist crusader she was. that was enlightening to say the least.